Ten

Suzanne drops off Petra downtown and steers south, where her Irish father lives stubbornly among Italians despite the fact that the last Italian willing to give him the time of day divorced him with cause two decades ago. She lets herself into his building and then into his third-floor flat.

He sits in the crooked frame of his window, exposing only a fraction of his profile. At this angle, though, his hand is larger than life. And Suzanne cannot forget that it is this hand that her mother saved her from, rousting her from sleep only days before her ninth Christmas, whispering close to her ear, “Quietly, quickly; come, Suzanne.” Her mother’s lips brushed her ear, and her face smelled clean, like mint. After that night, any time Suzanne spent with her father was counted in hours and not in days, and she understood that this was for the best.

Now his hand has stilled and the many serrated edges of his tricky personality have dulled. Years of heavy drinking have bored holes through his intelligence. As his brain’s nerves and synapses seek passage around these empty plugs to form a coherent story of the world, he revises the past and sees in the present mostly conspiracy and threat, whether from a new wrinkle in the tax code or the transport truck that bears toward his fender as he drives thirty miles per hour on the freeway.

She cannot bear to visit more than a few times a year. Ben never offers to come with her—and she never asks him to—so she always comes alone, with food prepared in a foil casserole pan.

Her mother, after they left that night, became a producer of frozen casseroles. She worked long days all week, in an office during the day and in the evening trying to sell houses in a sliding city, in a city whose residents had yet to discover that they wanted, after all, to live in town. So on the weekends her mother cooked for the week, freezing meals in foil pans for Suzanne to thaw and heat on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. As she grew older, Suzanne offered to help, to cook on weeknights. “No,” her mother would say, “your time is for practice.” When her mother died, she left a freezer full of neatly stacked dinners.

Eventually Suzanne ate this posthumous food, not out of nostalgia or tribute but because she was broke and needed to eat. The final meal was an improvised ratatouille stirred with noodles, made from an eggplant gone bitter, so the last taste of her mother was disappointment. Suzanne fell apart crying, wishing she had saved the delicious spinach lasagna or cacciatore for last.

“What are you looking at?” She starts to add the word Dad to the end of her question, but the consonant sticks on her tongue, and the question ends with a small thud.

“The garbage men. All they do is stand there and smoke. Company’s owned by the brother of the guy who owns the building. It’s a racket. My rent money goes to them so they can stand around and puff their Marlboros when all I can afford is generic. One of these days I’m going to do something about it.”

Suzanne nods, but her father’s attention stays trained through the window.

“One of these days I’m going to write a letter to someone. Maybe the newspaper, or that television station. Someone ought to investigate this racket. Maybe I’ll get a petition going around the building.”

“I just came to look in on you.” Suzanne crosses the small efficiency unit and puts the lasagna in the half-sized refrigerator. “I have a friend waiting for me, so I can’t stay.”

“I suppose you’ll want me to wash that pan after I eat.”

“No,” she says, and when he looks at her, she musters a smile. She says what she says every time: “It’s the kind of thing you can throw away if you don’t want to keep it.”

“I know you mean well, but that’s the problem with this country. Everyone thinks you can just throw things away. Pans, paper, marriages, babies.”

She feels a twitch in her ribs. “Well, you can wash and keep the pan if you want, and maybe you’ll like what’s in it. I grew the basil—no cellophane bags involved.”

She waits, but her father sees only the workers who have caught his ire.

“I’ll see you next time,” she says. “Take care of yourself.”

Alex often asked her why she would drive to Philadelphia and back when she could have Chinese food or pizza delivered to her father with a phone call. Yet he understood, as much as anyone could, that her relationship to her childhood is more complicated than that.

Her car is parked to the left, past the garbage collectors, but she turns right to circle the block rather than cross her father’s field of vision and earn a role in one of the myriad small conspiracies against him. Though she strides, neck tall and straight, she feels like a teenager disappearing around the corner to sneak a cigarette. Or an adulterous wife walking an extra block, hoping her lover will call her cell phone like he said he would.

Over her the sky is mostly the same concrete gray as the buckling sidewalk, though sun glows through the connective tissue between cirrus clouds, making their edges glint like metal. She can hear from above the sound of knives scraped against a honing stone and is terrified that she doesn’t know whether the sharp sweeping noises come from an upstairs apartment or from the hot-steely sky itself, an auditory announcement of impending cosmic retribution.

An Asian woman trundles three children wearing summer shirts through the narrow door to a vegetable market. She makes brief eye contact with Suzanne but does not smile. Suzanne quickens her steps, anxious to be sealed into her car, its roof between her and the sky, the vent blowing cool air through the dashboard and the radio pushing out any music at all.